So i have the lovely task of migrating about 800 Windows XP machines to Windows 7 without any user interaction.

So far i have decided to tackle this by Using GRUB4DOS to boot a WinPE iso to reimage the XP partition with a generic Windows7 image and configure via a mass of different scripts - this i am fairly confident with (thanks to Reboot.pro!)

The issue I have come to now though is M$ Office and Outlook. The issue is that across about 500 machines I have a varying degree of different Office installation (from 2003 to 2013) and on the same amount of machines i have Outlook installed with different Email accounts/settings/credentials.

Throughout my googling I have come across 2 products that offer a solution to this issue (Zinstall and PCMover) - both applications promise to be able to move the application in its entirety to a new build without the need of media or user input. The way i see it is that they take a 'backup' of the whole installation and then just apply said backup to the new machine.

Does anybody know how they do this? Is there a 'Freeware/opensource' method to do this? Can they actually do what they are promising(1 big thing i can think of is i am moving form 32bit Xp to win764bit)? Does anyone have any experience in these products?

But if you have to migrate 800 (eight hundred) machines, you surely can afford to buy a license for each of them and see how they behave.

In any case, with suites as complex and as integrated as MS Office *something* may always happen and re-installing is often a good idea, I presume that the tools that do the transfer actually do the transfer (i.e. they don't perform a system round integrity check for installed application or "repair" anything) so most probably the result will be a "target" asbotchedas the source (and a several years old install is likely to be botched, one way or the other).

These "migration" tools surely do a good work in the moving of the programs , but they cannot possibly be ready (or tested enough) to deal with all the "queer" situations that may have been created on a system after years of use.

So i have the lovely task of migrating about 800 Windows XP machines to Windows 7 without any user interaction.

So far i have decided to tackle this by Using GRUB4DOS to boot a WinPE iso to reimage the XP partition with a generic Windows7 image and configure via a mass of different scripts - this i am fairly confident with (thanks to Reboot.pro!)

The issue I have come to now though is M$ Office and Outlook. The issue is that across about 500 machines I have a varying degree of different Office installation (from 2003 to 2013) and on the same amount of machines i have Outlook installed with different Email accounts/settings/credentials.

Throughout my googling I have come across 2 products that offer a solution to this issue (Zinstall and PCMover) - both applications promise to be able to move the application in its entirety to a new build without the need of media or user input. The way i see it is that they take a 'backup' of the whole installation and then just apply said backup to the new machine.

Does anybody know how they do this? Is there a 'Freeware/opensource' method to do this? Can they actually do what they are promising(1 big thing i can think of is i am moving form 32bit Xp to win764bit)? Does anyone have any experience in these products?

I don't know about those but I have used EaseUS ToDo PCTrans software and it has worked very well for me.

Office migrated just fine. I haven't seen any open source alternative yet

So EaseUS seemed to have a compelling price point - but after talking to their Sales Support team it seems that you HAVE to have user interaction - you can script the whole thing which i need to be able to do!

Question I would ask is : is this scenario safe/cost efficient (introducing bugs/issues has a cost)?

My understanding is that you are going for a clean/fresh O.S install (while using scripting to export/import user settings) : very good.

But when it comes to applications, because of one particular constraint (you dont have the medias), you want to "move" the application : tough ...

Having managed thousands of computer/user migrations in the past, I foresee troubles : in best case scenario, you will have to spend a huge amount of efforts for a limited result / In worse case scenario, you will encouter massive issues keeping you busy for the next year and ruining your migration (and reputation)

IMHO, you want to use an enterprise solution (right tool + right process), not a consumer product.

The ideal scenario would be to go for a clean/fresh install for applications as well (while using scripting as well to export/import user settings).

Actually, I would even recommend to harmonize your office applications first or consider migrating office to one unique/latest version.

A computer migration scenario is usually seen from a workplace point of view : you want to upgrade it all (O.S + MS applications) as from a end user point of view, it is all "windows" .

Now, I purely appreciate that one has to deal with his environement/company constraints but when it comes to migrate near a thousand users, it might be worth to go for the safest scenario and therefore to challenge your management (we, IT's, tend to sell cheap solutions to our business).

Side note : if your MS office softwares are licensed, you should be able to retrieve the medias?

Last but not least, what about spending some more time and money on a long term deployement solution so that next time you have to reinstall a computer, you can re use the solution you used to perform your migration (like a "one button click" solution) ?

For a company your side, it would make sense.

On a more technical note:

-I had good success with MS USMT in the past

-Outlook also has some interesting command line flags which could be of interest

Zinstall doesn't get much love - luckily they have provided me with a free key to do some testing in our environment to see how it performs!

erwan.l I do get your point, and believe me that i would love to 'reinstall' via new media but there are a couple of factors that are hindering this;

1: We have multiple different flavors of office/outlook out there, over a WAN, which i will have to transfer the OS already - so limiting the amount of data i need to transfer would be key!

2: I am not sure of any license keys used and any Outlook credentials used.

3: Automation is primary concern. This has to be completed over night without anyone realizing. End user leaves office at night, comes back in the morning and everything is the same (just its on windows 7 and not XP anymore!)

What would be lovely is if there was a M$ routine to do a in place upgrade (like 7-->10)

Moving applications where licences are unknown will be tricky and challenging!

And even if you achieve that, remember that you will still have that issue next time you want to migrate again.

Make sure you have proper backups and a scenario to roll back (i.e image the whole system before migrating?) as even if you manage your scenario in a lab, there are probably dozens of unknown combinations out there waiting to make your life miserable

Exporting/Importing outlook settings should be achievable (if you decide to reinstall outlook).

I guess it is all about tackling a root cause issue versus applying a workaround for that issue.

3: Automation is primary concern. This has to be completed over night without anyone realizing. End user leaves office at night, comes back in the morning and everything is the same (just its on windows 7 and not XP anymore!)

Next step is:

4. Make sure that on that morning you are very far away and unreachable.

More seriously, it is - with all due respect - the most senseless approach to a migration I have ever heard about.

Nothing will go wrong of course, but you have the potentiality to put your whole organization on their knees for an unknown amount of time.

Of course I don't know the details, but it is not like you are migrating "much" (since you are keeping "as they are" most programs), it sounds like a "political only" upgrade in order to have an underlying "supported by MS" Operating System, if this is the case, it would be more logical to spread the migration in several groups, let's say for the sake of the reasoning 8 groups, two initial "test ones" of 25 workstations each and then 6 groups of 125 workstation each.

Of course if the two tests groups migrate without any issues you can go for bigger later groups.

The ONLY way IMNSHO you could afford to do a migration "all in one" would be if you had a proven, tested, verified, 100% failproof backup/imaging system so that the user of the workstation could in a simple way (in case of trouble) revert in no (or nearly no) time to the previous OS and setup.

Interests:An investigation is underway to determine whether Trump has any ties to America.

Posted 16 January 2016 - 01:33 AM

I would say that is is better to simply reinstall all your applications rather than trust some software to (hopefully) migrate everything successfully. Windows has changed so much since XP, it's quite likely that something wont work correctly.

it wasn't ever going to be 800 machines overnight. It was going to be 20 at a time

The idea solution for me is that the entire estate moves to Office 365 E1 and then i Don't have to worry at all. But costs comes into it where someone will say 'But i paid £100+ for office 2003, why do i now need to pay£x a month for it?!'

I tried Zinstall and already have my doubts on it. Used a Wim image of 7.2GB to clone a machine in my lab. Ran the Zinstall application and it 'container' created a file 19GB in size!

Laplink and Easus both have only GUI interfaces. There is one more i found 'PickMeApp' but this hits all AVs for they are marketing supported (ie CrapWare)

So Zinstall say they act very much like Ghost. So it is an uncompressed disk image. They do believe they can add an exclusion list to the capture process. So instead of 'only back up this' it is a backup everything except this.